How to Improve User Retention with Surveys

Acquiring new users and customers takes a lot of our time and focus, and getting good at it is practically an art, but let’s face it – the game doesn’t end when these visitors to your site click the buy button and become a customer.

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You want to keep your new customers for as long as possible, but to achieve a good rate of user retention you need to offer those customers something in return for their continued custom.

So, how can you find out what they want?

What Is User Retention Rate All About?

Before we find out how we can improve our user retention rate, let’s define what it is. User (or customer) retention rate is also known as loyalty rate, as it measures the percentage of customers in a specific period who remain customers after another period.

In other words, if you track customers who buy from you in November and December one year, you would measure how many of them still bought from you that next holiday period.

User retention rate is a way to put a number and a trackable metric on your customer loyalty.

Why Is It Important to Track (and Improve) Your User Retention?

If you aren’t paying attention to your customer retention, you may not realize that you are doing something that is turning off your customers. To improve your customer loyalty and retention, you need to make sure you are serving the customers you already acquired, not simply focusing on new clients. Often, this is an area of business that gets overlooked, so it’s important you do what you can to improve your customer retention and loyalty.

How You Can Improve User Retention with Surveys

Run Customer Satisfaction Surveys

How will you know if your customers were happy with their order?

If you don’t ask them how they feel about the checkout process and the product, your only way of knowing will be if they take the initiative to reach out to you.

You cannot take their silence as a sign they were completely satisfied with the process.

Do you really want the first time you hear back from your customers to be when they leave you a public review or message?

If someone isn’t satisfied with your service they are quite likely to never reach out to you and will simply move on to a competitor. If you want to maximize your user retention efforts, you need to stay in touch with your customers to find out what they want and need.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are two metrics that allow you to evaluate the overall satisfaction levels of your customers and the likelihood of these customers recommending your product or service to friends, strangers, and colleagues.

By running surveys to help you measure these metrics you’ll be able to see trends in your NPS and CSAT score over time for all your customers and per user.

If you find your scores are dropping, you can see it as an opportunity to reach out and discover the source or sources of this dissatisfaction. This way you can make changes to bring customer satisfaction back up, and consequently improve client retention and customer loyalty.

Run Customer Effort Score Surveys

A Customer Effort Score (CES) is another method of measuring customer satisfaction, but it specifically measures your customer’s satisfaction and experience with your product or service on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult”, to determine how much effort was required to use it.

There is evidence to suggest that the ease of use of a product or service often correlates with feelings of customer loyalty, so it’s worth surveying your customers to find out how easy they find your product to use and take note of any common difficulties your customers are experiencing.

Customer Service Surveys

If you ask a handful of people for their favorite brands and stores and then ask them why they feel this way, you’ll find a common theme: they have had excellent customer service experiences. Nothing quite builds customer loyalty like great customer service.

When something goes wrong the companies who go above and beyond to quickly rectify the situation are the ones who earn long-term customer loyalty.

Great customer service does two very important things for user retention: it proves to the customer (and anyone they tell about their experience) that your brand is trustworthy.

Trust is the key to making sales and having customers who return again and again. A trustworthy brand can continue to retain customers even when competitors offer a cheaper product or service because that company offers more perceived value.

If you have already purchased a product from one company who gave you extraordinary customer service, why would you go to an unknown competitor just to save a few dollars? The monetary saving would have to be extreme to force those customers to try out a different company.

The second thing great customer service does for your brand is it makes your customer feel valued and important. This is another thing that breeds customer loyalty and promotes client retention – no one likes to feel like just another number or a walking wallet to a company.

They want to feel like the company truly values their opinion and wants to do everything in their power to keep them happy. This isn’t always possible, but you should strive to do this for your ideal customers at all times.

Ask the customers who contact you for support to answer a survey on their experience once their support ticket is closed to find out what you did right and what could be improved. A dissatisfied customer is likely to take their business elsewhere, so it’s important you consider their replies seriously.

It is much easier to retain customers you already have than it is to find new ones. So, it’s important you find ways to communicate with your customers so they can give you feedback about what you are doing right, wrong, and what they think would make their overall experience with your brand the best it can be.